Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks talks about one of the most scandalous and destructive aspects of what we still call our "justice" system in the United States in For-Profit Prison Gets Name on Football Stadium 02/20/2013 02/20/2013.
They start talking at around 2:35 about the large amounts being spent by the federal government to detain suspected undocumented immigrants in private prisons.
One major factor with private prisons is that they can use various financial contributions to lobby (or just buy) politicians to pass tougher laws so that more people will go to prison so that they can make more money from the public till while they are cutting every cost they can get away with cutting to improve profits.
Tim Murphy reported earlier this month about how the radical-right National Rifle Association (NRA) and the for-profit prison industry share an interest in putting more and more people in jail in The Big House That Wayne LaPierre BuiltMother Jones 02/08/2013. Fr the NRA, making more and more acts criminal allows them to use fear of crime to sell guns and ammunition. For the for-profit prison industry, it lets them make money from the taxpayers by housing the prisoners resulting from tougher and tougher laws.
The campaign the NRA promoted in the 1990s, called CrimeStrike, for more laws to put more people in prison and for longer terms led to badly overcrowded prisons even with massive prison construction. And to more opportunity for the for-profit prison industry. Murphy writes:
The number of people serving time in state or federal prisons increased 100 percent between 1990 and 2005. But California and Texas, the two states where the NRA had expended the most capital, were the most striking examples. The Golden State's three-strikes law differed from most of the other 29 in that it applied to an exceedingly broad definition of what amounted to a "strike." Under its guidelines, nonviolent crimes — including, in one famous case, the filching of a slice of pizza — were enough to put someone behind bars for life. ...
The prisons became simultaneously more crowded and more expensive to maintain. Writing for the majority in 2011, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that inmates in California were forced to live in "telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets," and often went more than a year without receiving medical attention. The state's corrections system, Kennedy argued, was "incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society."
The consequence of California's reforms is that Texas now leads the nation in incarceration, with 154,000 people behind bars—more prisoners per capita than all but three countries. The construction boom addressed what criminal-justice watchdogs considered to be a serious problem: Violent felons were being released before they were even eligible for parole because there simply wasn't any room. But CrimeStrike and its allies did nothing to curb the underlying problem — a sentencing system that locked people up for the smallest of crimes, kept them there for a while, and openly mocked efforts to keep them from coming back.
All that's left of the NRA's prison-building arm 20 years later is a television show by the same name. Hosted by LaPierre, Crime Strike features weekly reenactments of gun owners defending their turf, with the mantra: "Take aim and fight back." But the program's legacy lives on in concrete ways.
This shows exactly what kind of people NRA followers really are. For all their talk of watering the tree of liberty with blood of tyrants, they are actually the worst kind of authoritarians. They're fine with government power when it comes to any police agency (not charged with gun regulation) and they cheer it enthusiastically when it imprisons large numbers of people they consider to be undesirable. The only powers they don't wish the government to have is the power to tax them for the cost of these authoritarian institutions or to regulate their personal firepower. And they downright love a man in uniform, whether a cop or a soldier. ...
Read the whole story at Mojo about the NRA's prison plan. And then contemplate the fact that the Democrats decided after the 2000 election that they couldn't possibly go against them ever again. (And people wonder why so many of us find the Democratic Party's "strategies" so contemptible.)
As Ana and Cenk note in their report, Obama was eager to facilitate the agenda of the xenophobes and the for-profit prison lobby, considerably exceeding the number of deportations that the Cheney-Bush Administration made in any comparable period. In the Grand Compromiser pose, this was justified by Obama's loyalists on the issue by saying it would convince Republicans that he was serious about border enforcement, and that would make them more open to compromise on immigration reform. They got the deportations, we'll see how many Republicans vote for any decent immigration reform bill.
The NRA and their supporting background chorus of gun fetishists would be an excellent target for Obama to discredit and thereby discredit much of the "culture war" rhetoric of which their positions are an integral part.
Brian Tashman reports in Gun Activists Warn Obama is Raising a Private Black Army to Massacre White AmericansRight Wing Watch 02/22/2013 that the rhetoric from Gun Owners of America and its President Larry Pratt encourage even wilder rhetoric in the service of unlimited gun proliferation. Obama and the Democrats should be forcing the Republicans to either own or repudiate such characters. Obama seems to have little intention of doing so. But at least the focus on gun violence and the proliferation of guns and ammo is highlighting the crackpot extremism of groups like the NRA, the Gun Owners of America and their close Republican allies.
Dave Neiwert and Charlie Pierce show how the NRA is linking their "culture war" issues of guns, guns and more guns to the "culture war" issues of hating on Latino immigrants with the usual mindless nationalism that comes with xenophobia in, respectively, NRA's Latest Outburst: Evil Mexicans Are Coming to Kill You!C&L 02/15/2013 and Charlie Pierce, All The Latest RageEsquire Politics Blog 02/20/2013.
Dave, who actually knows what he's talking about on these matters, declares, "I think it is now safe to assert that the National Rifle Association is now officially a far-right extremist organization. It began its final descent into this realm -- where it had been teetering increasingly in the recent years -- this week, and with this latest outburst, it's now official." He uses as Exhibit A this video featuring Wayne LaPierre that the NRA distributed to their members, which is basically a several-minutes long xenophobic, Patriot Militia sort of propaganda piece about scary Mexicans and A-rab terrorists pouring across the US-Mexican border.
I was struck by how the piece tries hard to discredit the factual reality that "cut-out" purchases of assault weapons in the United States have massively fueled the killing among drug gangs in Mexico itself as many of those weapons are smuggled south across the border. Both universal background checks and the banning of the manufacture and importation of assault rifles would definitely mitigate that particular problem.
That's also a classic "tell" for the far-right thinking going on here. The NRA's only real purpose is to sell guns and ammo and more guns and ammo. And if large portions of those sales go to Mexican drug cartels, the Great God Free Market doesn't care at all. So it's not in the immediate profit interest of the firearms industry for which the NRA is the chief public face to limit the supply of weapons and ammunition sold in the US for smuggling to Mexico. So rather than try to duck the problem, this NRA ad tries to redefine it as (1) not a real one, and (2) one that it would be offensive to American patriotism to even try to solve.
Which fits with the xenophobia and white racism to which the ad panders and encourages. The small arms traffic to Mexico fuels the violence of the drug gangs there, which then allows the NRA and their culture-war allies to paint Mexicans and Latinos as violent thugs coming to git us innocent Amurcans, and so we Amurcans need to buy us even more guns and ammo to protect ourselves from the scary, scary Spanish-speaking people.
Marketing of death via hatred and fear: because for the NRA, to steal from a well-known sports saying, selling and ammo isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing.
For the Republican Party, defender of (their versions of) family values and True Christianity, hatred and fear can also produce turnout and votes. And, as Pierce explains, their are position hatred of immigrants as their main issue to get out their Grumpy Old Party base of aging white people for the 2014 elections:
If you want to know where the abandoned wrath is going to focus in the next election, this is the issue — and there's nothing Marco Rubio can do to stop it, in case you were wondering. It is now past cliche to note that the Republican party, and the conservative movement that gives it most of its money and all of its intellectual energy, is presently reaping what it sowed, that the chickens have returned clamorously to the roost, and that crows doth sit upon the capitol. However, for that dynamic to have a material focus on the 2014 midterms, it needs a focus. Now, you might think that would be guns, but the party and most of its elected members are on roughly the same page as the NRA as nearly as I can tell. However, the Republicans have looked at the demographics of the last election and they have made a concerted -- and very public -- effort to reform themselves on this issue because they would rather not become the Whigs of the 21st Century. As is obvious from the highlighted excerpt above, guns have their salience as an intraparty issue only when they can be connected to the issue of illegal immigration, not the other way around. In this formulation, you will note, the right to bear arms is yet another "free government benefit" that the "illiterate invaders" want. [my emphasis]
And, as Dave's piece shows, the NRA is doing their part to merge the love of guns, guns and more guns to fear of the scary Mexicans anyway.
I've never thought Howard Fineman, a generally reliable purveyor of conventional wisdom, was an impressive choice for the Huffington Post's stable of writers. His article on the death of Bin Laden reminds me why; Obama Gets Osama: Goodbye VietnamThe Huffington Post 05/02/2011:
By calmly and meticulously overseeing the successful targeting of Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama just proved himself -- vividly, in almost Biblical terms -- to be an effective commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States.
Good night, Vietnam. Goodbye, George McGovern's anti-war campaign of 1972. Goodbye, Jimmy Carter's pathetically inept hostage-rescue mission in 1980. Goodbye, Bill Clinton and the draft.
Or so Democrats have at least some reason to hope.
There have been all kinds of reactions all over the map to Bin Laden's death. This is the dumbest one I've come across. Bin Laden's death made Howard Fineman flash back to the days that defined the favorite images of Republican "culture warriors" - and decided it proves that George McGovern and the hippies have finally been exorcised from the Democratic Party!
I recently had my attention called to this routine by the late comedian Red Skelton, whose TV show in the 1960s was most popular among older and more conservative viewers. He famously closed his show with the phrase, "Good night and God bless." Which as a kid I always thought was a bit odd because most people, then and now, add an object when they say "God bless ...", as in "God bless Grandma", God bless America", etc. The grammatical quirk is actually the reason I remember it, though. So marketing-wise, it was an effective construction.
The clip is from his show in 1969 and records a Pledge of Allegiance routine he did, that has been celebrated by conservative culture warriors ever since. That it still plays that role is indicated by the fact that the YouTube video embedded below opens with the caption, "From ImgnNoLibs and Politically Incorrect Freedom Loving Americans Everywhere". Exactly how the Pledge of Allegiance, an official pledge adopted by the Congress of the United States to which there is no significant political opposition would be "politically incorrect" is not explained. But presumably it still sounds like good culture war material to whoever slapped that label on at the start.
For whatever reason, I was intrigued by what makes this particular clip still popular. And it turned into a bit of a research project, the results of which I'm sharing in this long post.
For context, 1969 was the first year of the Nixon-Agnew Administration. Vice President Spiro Agnew was that Administration's point-man in implementing the Republican Party's "Southern Strategy", which aimed at a partisan realignment of voters from the Democratic Party - to which many conservative voters were still attracted, especially in the South. Agnew rallied conservatives with his invective against various perceived enemies of good Christian white folks. There were antiwar protesters, who he styled as America-hating hippies with poor personal hygiene. There were scary, scary black militants. There were the subversive professors. And, of course, liberal Democrats who were supporting this horde of enemies facing the "Silent Majority", the Nixon-Agnew catchphrase for what Sarah Palin calls Real Americans.
On the face of it, a performance paying vague tribute to the Pledge of Allegiance isn't an obvious candidate for culture war passions, since a phrase like "with liberty and justice for all" is far more likely to trouble conservatives than liberals. And there wasn't any politically significant opposition to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1969 and hasn't been since.
The "culture war" hook is really at the very end. Here is the clip:
Transcript:
I remember a teacher that I had. Now I only, I went - I went through the seventh grade, I went through the seventh grade. I left home when I was ten years old because I was hungry. And I used to- It's true. I'd work in the summer and I'd go to school in the winter. But I had this one teacher, he was the principal of the Harrison School in Vincennes, Indiana. To me this was the greatest teacher, a real sage, of my time, anyhow. He had such wisdom.
And we were all reciting the Pledge of Allegiance one day. And he walked over, this little old teacher, Mr. Laswell was his name. Mr. Laswell, who was this, uh- And he says:
"I've been listening to you boys and girls recite the Pledge of Allegiance all semester. And it seems as though it's becoming monotonous to you. If I may, may I recite it and try to explain to you the meaning of each word.
"I: Me, an individual, a committee of one.
"Pledge: Dedicate all of my worldly goods to give without self-pity.
"Allegiance: My love and my devotion.
"To the Flag: Our standard, Old Glory, a symbol of Freedom; wherever she waves there's respect, because your loyalty has given her a dignity that shouts, 'Freedom is everybody's job'.
"United: That means that we have all come together.
"States: Individual communities that have united into forty-eight great states. Forty-eight individual communities with pride and dignity and purpose. All divided with imaginary boundaries, yet united to a common purpose, and that is love for country.
"And to the Republic: Republic, a state in which sovereign power is invested in representatives chosen by the people to govern. And government is the people; and it's from the people to the leaders, not from the leaders to the people.
"For which it stands: [Mr. Laswell apparently had no sage definitions for this]
"One Nation: One Nation, meaning, so blessed by God.
"Indivisible: Incapable of being divided.
"With Liberty: Which is Freedom, the right of [sic] power to live one's own life, without threats, fear, or some sort of retaliation.
"And Justice: The principle, or qualities, of dealing fairly with others.
"For All: For All, which means, boys and girls, it's as much your country as it is mine.
"And now, boys and girls, let me hear you recite the Pledge of Allegiance:
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic, for which it stands; one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all."
Since I was a small boy, two states have been added to our country, and two words have been added to the Pledge of Allegiance: "under God".
Wouldn't it be a pity if someone said that is a prayer, and that would be eliminated from schools, too?
Today's Christian Right didn't have any easily-comparable counterparts in American politics in 1969. But one issue that our "culture warriors" still complain about today is the Supreme Court rulings of 1962-63 that held that compulsory prayer in public schools was a violation of the First Amendment establishment clause, because it put a governmental institution in the position of requiring minors to participate in a religious ritual. The key cases were Engel v. Vitale (1962and School District of Abington Township v. Schempp (1963).
I won't try to relitigate Engel and Abington Township in this post. But I will mention that the great country harmonists, Charlie and Ira Louvin, aka, the Louvin Brothers, did what we might call a protest song about this issue, "Don't Let Them Take the Bible Out of Our School Rooms" (1962), written by George Donald McGraw. The chorus was:
Don't let them take the Bible out of our school rooms Don't let them close the door of your child's heart Don't let them rob our children of salvation If you do we're going to lose them from the start
One verse invokes some comparisons:
If it's right to allow liquor in most counties On the newsstand see the sinful pictures there If it's right for moving pictures of corruption Dear God how can we say it's wrong for prayer
For those younger than 80, "moving pictures" presumably refers to "motion pictures", aka, movies.
To complete the culture war context, in the Mississippi high school I was attending in 1969, the school district didn't get around to complying with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling by fully desegregating until the 1970-71 school year. So for many of the voters who were the main targets of the Republicans' Southern Strategy, the fight against what they saw as federal court tyranny was still very prominently focused on school desegregation. But the evil federales trying to rob innocent school children of their salvation by enforcing the First Amendment was a closely related grievance. My high school, by the way, held morning prayers every day, even after full desegregation. I suppose the federal Justice Department was giving desegregating the schools priority over sending little kids to Hail.
Though Skelton's closing line in that routine was vague, that context is what gives it its "culture war" punch. And since the terms of today's "culture war" are remarkably fixated on what our culture warriors remember of the period circa 1969, it's not surprising that the routine has a continued appeal for some.
That closing line is the hook. But when I look at what the clip actually is, I can't help but be surprised that the hook has much hook at all.
From both a Christian religious point of view and from an American citizen's viewpoint, I see separation of church and state as a very good thing for both religion and democratic government. Today's Christian dominionists who believe the latter should be subject to the former would be well advised to take the advice from a song of the Australian singer/songwriter Paul Kelly, "Be careful what you pray for/You just might get it". Do Baptists and Methodists really want the "apostles" of Sarah Palin's "New Apostolic Reformation" brand of Pentecostalism promoting their particular brand of religion through the government and the public schools? Even the main Pentecostal domination in the US, the Assemblies of God, formally considers that brand of Pentecostalism "heresy". Even Palin's Pentecostals might want to consider what it would be like to have their teachings dissected as part of official Congressional debates over public policy. Because merging of church and state inevitably means that the influence flows both ways.
Ole Red's reconstruction of his childhood memories may also lack in historical precision. The Internet Movie Database gives his birthdate as 1913, although the bio there notes that late in life he claimed he had fudged his age, meaning apparently he claimed to be younger than he was. And he says in the clip he only made it through the 7th grade. Here is how Red shows the sage Mr. Laswell saluting the flag back in the good ole days:
But the standard flag salute that typically went along with the Pledge in those days was the "Bellamy salute". This is how it looked:
That photo from the Library of Congress, which gives its date as May 1942 - long after Red Skelton would have finished the 7th grade.
This article from USHistory.org on The Pledge of Allegiance gives a recap of the various alterations to the Pledge and the standard salute, observing of the latter, "In World War II, the salute too much resembled the Nazi salute, so it was changed to keep the right hand over the heart throughout." The Italian Fascists and German Nazis adopted their similar salutes after the tradition of the Bellamy salute had started. But surely the sage Mr. Laswell, who so admired the Pledge, would have used the accepted standard salute, not the one adopted years later.
But if Red had used the Bellamy salute in his 1969 routine, it might have suggested that the Pledge and its traditions weren't quite so sacred as his pious tone in the routine implies - though he obviously acknowledges that the official text was changed (in 1954) to include the phrase "under God". This piece from the US Dept of Veterans Affairs, Celebrating America's Freedoms: The Pledge of Allegiance, gives additional information on the history of the Pledge, which was first officially adopted by Congress in 1942, long after Red Skelton's seventh-grade experience.
Although hardline atheists and some civil libertarians have pressed at times to restrict the use of the Pledge because the inclusion of the phrase "under God", so far they have failed to obtain any such definitive ruling in the courts. But the Supreme Court had decided on the Constitutional law regarding compulsory usage in public schools before the phrase "under God" was even added. In West Virginia Board of Education v Barnette in 1943 during the Second World War, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not compel students to recite the Pledge or salute the flag, but the decision did not ban the Pledge from public schools. The majority opinion by Justice Jackson notes that the standard salute was still the stiff-arm Bellamy salute. In the decision, Jackson wrote for the majority:
To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. ...
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
Did Red Skelton object to that description of the essential legal content of the First Amendment? Do those today who find his little routine moving? Like whoever "ImgnNoLibs and Politically Incorrect Freedom Loving Americans Everywhere" may be? Don't they support "liberty and justice for all"?
In any case, that was settled law in 1969. But, of course, it would also have stepped on the "culture war" message to say that.
Then there's Mr. Laswell's phrase-by-phrase breakdown, as quoted by his former adoring student. I'd have to say it's banal, at best. It may be nice for children. But why would adults even notice? I know that we're not expected to actually think about these little culture-war devotional pieces, just to cheer for a world with no more Libs. But check this out: "United: That means that we have all come together." It would be impressive for, say, a three-year-old to come up with that on their own; for the sage Mr. Laswell, not so much. But, gosh, to mention a milestone in the achievement of "united" like the Civil War might also cloud the culture war message. (Since Red seems to have adapted Mr. Laswell's salute to 1969, I'm going to guess some of the lines may not be exact quotes written down at that very moment in Red's childhood.)
Or this line, "And Justice: The principle, or qualities, of dealing fairly with others." Since Sage Mr. Laswell offered his boys and girls the mind-bending definition of "I" as "a committee of one" - which I don't even understand - perhaps he could have given them a little more substantial take on this whole "justice" thing. For example: "the rule of law in which every person is treated fairly and equally regard to their wealth or status".
And I'm still chewing on the definition of "One Nation, meaning, so blessed by God." That's what "one nation" means? Wow. I realize that Patriotically Correct etiquette among our culture warriors requires that any mention of God be treated as beyond criticism or question. I mean, unless it's being made by a librul or one of them thar Muslims. But I'm sorry, I can't quite process Mr. Laswell's definition. Does "a nation" mean not especially blessed by God? Or "two nations", doubly blessed by God? It's all a bit too sage for me.
And since Mr. Laswell noticed that his pupils seemed to be getting bored by the Pledge, it made me wonder how often they were required to say it. Because, you know, anything repeated often enough can become rote recitation. Regardless, I wonder if all the other kiddies at Harrison School were as inspired by Mr. Laswell's part-banal, part-incomprehensible explanation as Little Red apparently was.
Which brings me to another interesting point about this routine. It's a story about a teacher explaining the thing to little children. It's all homey and heart-warming and stuff. But how do you get from that to taking it as a culture war piece that helps the Patriotically Correct imagine no liberals?
One last bit of Pledge trivia. This article by Tom Gibb, How the Pledge got GodPitsburgh Post-Gazette 06/28/2002, tells the story of how "under God" made its way into the Pledge, to which the same writer adds in Minister reprises 'under God' sermonPitsburgh Post-Gazette 08/19/2002. The text of the 1954 sermon by George Docherty on the subject, which became iconic, is available here from the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church.
But I have to wonder what our cultural warriors today would make of this part of Doucherty's sermon:
Some might assert this to be a violation of the first amendment to the Constitution. It is quite the opposite. The first amendment is concerned with the question of religion: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion."
Now, "establishment of religion" is a technical term. It means Congress will permit no state church in this land such as exists in England. In England the bishops are appointed by her Majesty. The church, by law, is supported by tiends or rent. The church, therefore, can call upon the support of the Law of the Land to carry out its own ecclesiastical laws. What the Declaration [he clearly means the First Amendment here] says, in effect, is that no state church shall exist in this land. This is separation of Church and State ... [my emphasis]
Christian dominionists make a particular point of denying that the First Amendment means any such thing as "separation of church and state". A comment in a debate by unsuccessful Delaware Senate candidate Christine "I'm not a witch" O'Donnell drew some attention to this issue back in October; see Jon Butler, Does the First Amendment Separate Church and State?History News Network 10/25/2010 and Candace Chellew-Hodge, O’Donnell Blows Church-State Separation Dog WhistleReligion Dispatches 10/19/2010.
Our cultural warriors today may find this part of the sermon even more unsettling:
Of course, as Christians, we might include the words 'under Jesus Christ' or 'under the King of Kings.' But one of the glories of this land is that it has opened its gates to all men of every religious faith. ...
There is no religious examination on entering the U.S.A. - no persecution because a man's faith differs even from the Christian religion. It must be "UNDER GOD" to include the great Jewish Community, and the people of the Moslem faith, and the myriad of denominations of Christians in the land.
What then of the honest atheist?
Philosophically speaking, an atheistic American is a contradiction in terms. Now don't misunderstand me. This age has thrown up a new type of man - we call him a "secular"; he does not believe in God; not because he is a wicked man, but because he is dialectically honest. He would rather walk with the unbelievers than sit hypocritically with people of the faith. These men, and many have I known, are fine in character; and in their obligations as citizens and good neighbors, quite excellent. [my emphasis]
Say what?!? He says Muslims believe in God, too? Why, the guy must have been a sympathizer of The Terrorists, or something! And saying an atheist can be "fine in character"? He does go on to make it pretty clear that he did intend to stigmatize atheists as "spiritual parasites", saying the atheist "falls short of the American ideal of life". But he also wasn't embracing the Muslim-hating bile we've been hearing from our cultural warriors the last few months.
In 2002, as Tom Gibb reports in the first of his two articles linked above, just months after the 9/11 attacks, Docherty had this to say about the "under God" phrase:
"This is a nation built on the principle that there is a God, but it doesn't define it," Docherty said. "It could be the Christian God. It could be the Judeo God. It could be the Buddhan god, it could the Mohammedan God. But it's built on a vertical relationship with God." [my emphasis]
And then there's this from the same report:
Docherty and his wife, Sue, who teaches fourth grade across the road at Juniata Valley Elementary School, live in a comfortable home, looking out on mountains and cornfields, a universe from where George Docherty preached to presidents and lawmakers.
The messages weren't benign.
He was a civil rights advocate and marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala. He opposed the war in Vietnam.
Oh.Under.God. The "UNDER GOD" preacher was a, a librul?!? He supported the Communists Negroes and civil rights activists in the South! He opposed the sacred crusade in Vietnam! No wonder Red recited the Pledge without the "under God" phrase in it.
That Doucherty fellow may have succeeded in slipping secret Islamunism into the Pledge of Allegiance itself! Oh, noes! In fact, if you look closely at that sermon again, he even says "the Communists claim, there is Justice in Russia. They have their law courts. They have their elections with universal suffrage." What, it, what - the guy was obviously a screaming Marxist! We'd better get Glenn Beck and his Black Robed Regiment on this at once! And if the Islamunofascists have inserted the Muslimist God into the official Pledge of Allegiance ... that means Sharia is the law of the land now!!! Oh, the horror, the horror ...
After wading through the "ick" of the Polanski case to get a picture of how our conservative culture warriors are using it, this story was a real kicker: Franken Wins Bipartisan Support For Legislation Reining In KBR’s Treatment Of Rape by Faiz Shakir, Think Progress 10/07/09; Meet The Senators Who Voted Against The Franken Amendment by Jason Linkins Huffington Post 10/07/09. Minnesota Sen. Al Franken introduced an amendment prompted by the case of a woman working with KBR (Halliburton) in Iraq, who in 2005 was held in a shipping container for 24 hours and gang-raped by fellow Halliburton/KBR employees. The company's contractual terms effectively prevented her from taking the case to court. And as Faiz Shakir reports, hers "was not an isolated case."
The amendment passed the Senator on a 68-30 vote. Meaning that 30 Senators voted against legislation to prevent Halliburton/KBR from covering up cases of rape committed by its employees. You can check out the full list of votes here. The Jason Linkins piece above lists the 30 who voted to protect rapists. It includes great champions of decency like Jim DeMint. And the bold Maverick John McCain, who's leading a new effort to highlight "moderate" Republicanism. And the Maverick's faithful puppy-dog Lindsey Graham. And hardcore torture supports like Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Kit Bond of Missouri.
I wonder if Al Mohler will do a column claiming the 30 Senators voting "no" are saying that "when it comes to one of their own, [gang-rape] is within the pale." I'm guessing not.
Sadly, it's consistent: using sloppy reporting of facts to unfairly bash the "Hollywood cultural elite" over the Polanski case, while voting to protect rapists from a favored Republican company like Halliburton/KBR. Consistently disgusting and shameful.
Brother Al Mohler, Jr., who as President Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville KY has a large influence on Southern Baptist theology, uses the Polanski case to bash liberals and "Hollywood" in Morality, Hollywood StyleChristian Post 10/04/09.
Mohler is too slick to slip into crass anti-Semitism. But, as the late blog pioneer Steve Gilliard used to remind us, to many conservative Republican Christians, "Hollywood" and "cultural elite" are among other things, synonyms for "Jews". So when I see big-name rightwingers start bashing groups they identify that way, I try to pay attention to what subtexts may be at work.
And its worth it for Democrats and liberals to actually use their heads on this one.
As I mentioned in my post on the Polanski case last week, I was uncomfortable with how Katha Pollitt formulated her criticism of what she called "the liberal cultural elite" in Roman Polanski Has a Lot of FriendsThe Nation Online 10/01/09: "The widespread support for Polanski shows the liberal cultural elite at its preening, fatuous worst. ... No wonder Middle America hates them." As I said in the earlier post, seeing as how even TV news has morphed into infotainment, I'm not convinced that "Middle America" hates Hollywood stars and directors.
Brother Al quoted those same words (without the ellipsis.) Hey, Brother Al, if you picked that up from my post you could have at least given me an "h/t"! Maybe Brother Al will pick me as the Unknown Liberal to pray for me to see the error of my Democratic ways. But he couldn't even cite her approvingly without identifying her as, "the feminist left-winger supreme". Which in Christian Right circles is pretty much the same as calling her a Satan-worshipping witch.
But Patrick Goldstein in the industry's hometown paper the Los Angeles Times writes in Is Hollywood really a hotbed of support for Roman Polanski? 10/06/09, responding to a claim by Terry Teachout in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal:
Teachout rattles off the names of a host of filmmakers -- including Woody Allen, Jonathan Demme, Sam Mendes, Mike Nichols and Martin Scorsese -- who signed an international petition that "demands the immediate release of Roman Polanski."
There's only one problem: All of those filmmakers, along with Harvey Weinstein, live far, far away from Hollywood and, with occasional exceptions, make their movies outside of Hollywood as well. If you look up the rest of the names on the best-known petition in circulation, it is filled with the names of foreign filmmakers, writers and actors -- including the likes of Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar Wai, Alfonso Cuaron, Isabelle Adjani and Salman Rushdie -- who also rarely set foot in Hollywood. If critics like Teachout want to claim that high-brow artists and writers have rushed to Polanski's defense, fair enough. But to say that Hollywood is in his corner, as part of a political argument that Hollywood is a liberal elite woefully ignorant of mainstream values, is just hogwash.
There's no petition going around with the names of the real Hollywood elite -- A-list filmmakers and studio chiefs like Steven Spielberg, Alan Horn, James Cameron, Amy Pascal, Jerry Bruckheimer, Brian Grazer, Tom Rothman, J.J. Abrams, John Lasseter or Michael Bay -- because the real Hollywood elite isn't supporting Polanski. In fact, they haven't offered the slightest hint of backing for Polanski. It's only European and New York-based artists, who clearly see the world in a very different light than the real Hollywood elite.
His observations apply to what Brother Al and to Katha Pollitt wrote, as well.
It's perfectly possible for people to have a more complex position on a complicated issue than for-or-against. It's also possible to take a straight-up for-or-against position on Polaski's extradition and still pay attention to reality. I would like to think that a leading writer for a liberal flagship publication like The Nation would take the time to do a little of the research Goldstein did for his article before holding forth with rightwing "culture war" buzzwords like "the liberal cultural elite" and applaud the (dubious) notion that "Middle America" (whoever she thinks that might be) "hates them" and with good reason.
Goldstein incorporates and essay by screenwriter Josh Olson into his article which is worth reading. Olsen reports that he counted 650 signatures on the two pro-Polanski petitions that he knew of that were circulating in Hollywood, and in using an expansive definition of which ones really belong to Hollywood, he finds only 35 names. Citing two writers who had said in the LA Times that “Hollywood is rallying behind the fugitive filmmaker,” he responds:
Well, speaking as someone who actually lives and works right in the heart of the city and the business, I can assure you that this isn’t even remotely true.
Their entire argument rests on just three things -- an incredibly poorly conceived off-the-cuff comment by Whoopi Goldberg, a petition that Harvey Weinstein is circulating, and that there isn’t a great hue and cry from Hollywood demanding that Polanski be brought to justice. I cannot speak to Ms. Goldberg’s painfully unfortunate comment, except to say that I have no doubt she didn’t mean it to come out quite the way it did. As for the lack of a hue and cry, I’m not entirely sure what we’re supposed to do.
I cannot pretend, as some have, to have spent the last thirty years gnashing my teeth at the fiend Polanski’s escape from justice, but neither can I pretend to be outraged that a convicted criminal who fled prosecution has been caught. Perhaps I missed the meeting where these things were explained, but it just never occurred to me that I was supposed to stage a rally when something happened that doesn’t bother, interest or affect me in the least. ...
What we are NOT, however, is sitting around fretting about whether or not Roman Polanski will be displeased with us if we publicly state that we think raping children is a bad thing. ...
Then there’s Jonathan Kuntz, who’s quoted as believing “the local reaction may be a version of the ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I.’" Well, again, no, but thank you for the extremely ugly insinuation, and when DID you stop beating your wife, Mr. Kuntz? Does it occur to ANY of these people that we’re not all sitting around in a clubhouse smoking crack, patting each other on the back and hoping not to get caught molesting children? [my emphasis]
It's also very possible for someone to use the Polanski case to talk about the problem of this kind of rape without giving easy ammunition to rightwing culture warriors to bash all them thar' Hollywood Jew elitists. Silverstein provides a couple of good examples in these posts, Rape is a Feminist Issue 10/01/09 and Does Being an “Artist” Trump Being a Rapist 09/29/09. In the earlier post, she notes that the actual "Hollywood" that she saw had signed on to the pro-Polanski petition didn't include any women from Hollywood. She's also critical of what she sees as the silence of feminist leaders and Hollywood notables on the issue. But what she says on the latter is quite interesting and does not pander to rightwing stereotypes, e.g., "In my gut, I believe that the women of Hollywood are appalled by what is happening. The fact that they are silent is a reminder of how little clout they have."
This is already long. But I want to get back to Brother Al. As a very influential leader in the country's largest Protestant denomination, is it too much to expect that he would also have done some basic fact-checking (beyond quoting Katha Pollitt's careless generalizations) on just how many prominent figures in the movie business in Hollywood were actually supporting Polanski in fighting extradition before he used the case to bash "Hollywood"? Here's what Brother Al has to say:
The response of so many Hollywood leading lights to the arrest of filmmaker Roman Polanski now suggests that, at least when it comes to one of their own, sex with children is within the pale. This deserves and demands a closer look.
The cultural left has responded to the arrest a week ago of Polanksi with outrage -- directed not at Polanski but at the arrest. [my emphasis]
He goes on to claim, apparently with no basis in fact, that "over 100 Hollywood luminaries had signed a petition demanding Polaski's release." And he effectively adds this to the Christian Right's bill of complaints against all them Jew liberal Democrat elitists:
The moral gap between Hollywood and "Middle America" is vast, though for some reason many Americans blind themselves to this fact. The Hollywood embrace of Roman Polanski and their outrage at his arrest in Switzerland shines a floodlight on this gap.
Are art and artists above moral accountability? The Hollywood elite seem to believe so -- and even to be willing to lend their names to the defense of the morally indefensible. Is the celebrity above the law? Watch this case closely. [my emphasis]
On the latter point, as I explained in my earlier post, the careless reporting that has become chronic with our Establishment press will make it too easy to claim that Polanski got off light because of his alleged "Hollywood" support. As I understand it, even the most stringent sentence is likely to be no more than a year in prison. And given what seem to be real misconduct problems in the first trial - and, yes, even confessed scumbags have the right to a fair and legal trial - it's more likely that Polanski won't do any jail time.
I'm guessing that one of the Law and Order franchise shows will do an episode this season based on this case. Maybe their version will have a more satisfying outcome than the real-life one is likely to bring.
I've pretty much tried to ignore the Roman Polanski extradition case. But it seems to be well on the way to becoming an international "culture war" issue. I hate these kinds of issues for two main reasons. One is that the "ick" factor of an fortysomething adult accused of having sex with a 13-year-old is high no matter what, whether it's in Hollywood or Afghanistan. The other is that probably no one but a legal specialist in this particular area of law actually has a good and reasonably objective opinion on what should actually be done or is customarily done in these kinds of cases.
But it's already become a symbolic issue, I'll state my own position, such as it is, up front. Really more of an understanding of the facts than a "position". It makes good sense to me that the Los Angeles District Attorney would seek extradition. The State of California has a real interest in seeing its judicial processes upheld. But it appears likely that no additional penalties will be because of some combination of the victim's wishes, the time since the crime, and serious concerns about improper conduct by the judge in the original case.
And, this being the real world, French and Polish concerns about their citizen Polanski's expedition shouldn't be dismissed out of hand out of anti-European sentiment or even genuine concern over the nature of the crime. An apparently unintentional AP leak has suggested that the Switzerland is cooperating in the extradition request due to political efforts related to defusing conflicts over criminal misconduct by the Swiss bank UBS rather than to the merits of the case. And Americans need to remember that it's not 2000 any more. The US is a country that tortures people and refuses to prosecute known torturers. Even if there is no particular concern that Polanski would be tortured, it is a serious concern that casts a shadow over all extradition cases involving the US. (This report, French government drops support for director Roman Polanski as he faces extradition to the U.S. over child sex charge by Peter Allen Daily Telegraph 10/01/09, says that the French government is now taking the position that Polanski should be freed from Swiss jail while extradition is pending but that it is not opposing the extradition.)
The "culture war" aspect comes out in this piece by Doreen Carvajal and Michael Cieply, France Divided Over Polanski CaseInternational Herald Tribune/New York Times 09/30/09. In fact, it was skimming the first few paragraphs of this article that made me think it might be worth knowing a bit more about the case, because it's become an issue because the French government has publicly defended Sarkozy's case against extradition to California.
Apparently in France as in the US, politicians not surprisingly think that the safer position is not to side with people in Polanski's current situation. I can't say the Carvajal/Cieply article was necessarily enlightening on the case. But they note in the third paragraph opposition to the conservative-led government's defense of Polanski from both the Greens and the "extreme right" party of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Given it's the New York Times, the writers and/or editors probably think that the xenophobia Le Pen party is their "this-side-says, the-other-side-says" style of reporting on what the Green leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit says. In the fifth paragraph, they at least get around to telling us that Polanski is a citizen of France and Poland, so the French government would have some reason to take some public position on the case.
Dany Cohn-Bendit was the most famous leader and symbol of the famous/(infamous) May-June 1968 uprising by students and workers in France. Carvajal and Cieply say he "criticized Sarkozy administration officials for leaping too quickly to Mr. Polanski’s side despite the serious nature of his crime". It's probably a good thing that the Times article didn't go into it. And maybe not a good thing that I'm mentioning it. But Cohn-Bendit does have a special reason to look like his siding against Polanski in this situation.
Several years ago, the German journalist Bettina Röhl dug up an embarrassing quote from Cohn-Bendit. As I explained at some length in an earlier post, Bettina Röhl harshes on former "68er" activists with a zeal that outruns the case she tries to make against them. She has her own family demons to deal with: her mother was Ulrike Meinhof of the "Baader-Meinhof Gang", her father Klause Rainer Röhl is a former flaming leftwinger turned flaming rightwinger and both parents were secret members of the East-German-directed underground Communist Party in West Germany. But she's a good researcher. And she turned up an interview with Cohn-Bendit that he had given years ago when he worked as a teacher in school with young children which seemed to suggest that he had engaged in inappropriate play with young children in that capacity.
Cohn-Bendit denied ever having done such a thing. And he said the quote was a poor attempt at humor, and a very inappropriate one. But from what I've seen of the case, there was never any reason to question his version. There were no such complaints at the time and no collaboration of such a thing from parents or students. I would say it was questionable ethics on Röhl's part to publish that information without any substantial collaboration. But, according to what Digby calls the Cokie Roberts Rule, the information was "out there" - it had been published in a small-circulation but public magazine before - and therefore it was fair game to report.
Still, it's a reminder of how sloppy reporting can damage people unfairly. The one time I saw the late great Molly Ivins speak live, back in the mid-1990s as the current plunge of press quality into the bottomless abyss was still in its early years, she was talking about factors in how reporting had deteriorated and become more irresponsible. And one example she gave was that it had for a long time been the practice of most papers not to publish the name of someone who had been accused but not convicted of molesting children. Because even if the charge was totally false and the accused unquestionably exonerated, the stigma was such that it could damage the accused permanently.
So I decided I would see what I could find that had been factually reported on the Polanski case before I tried to wade through the "cultural war" accusations.
Dismissal denied in Polanski child-sex case by Harriet Ryan 02/18/09. This is an interesting piece because it is recent but still months before the high-profile controversy of the past couple of weeks. This was an piece about a legal effort by Polanski to have the original case thrown out:
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza told a packed courtroom that he found the core argument in Polanski's request for a dismissal of charges -- allegations of unethical and, in some instances, illegal conduct by a prosecutor and a judge three decades ago -- to be credible.
"There was substantial, it seems to me, misconduct that occurred during the pendency of this case," Espinoza said.
But, the judge said, Polanski's fugitive status left him no choice but to deny the request. ...
In 1997, a prosecutor and a defense attorney worked out a plan for the director to surrender, be arrested at the airport, brought to court, sentenced and immediately released. The agreement fell apart with Polanski's side saying he objected to television coverage in court. ...
The victim, Samantha Geimer, settled a civil suit against Polanski and publicly forgave him. She has asked that the case be dismissed. Her attorney on Tuesday argued to Espinoza that she could make the motion to dismiss the charges if Polanski's fugitive status prevented the judge from doing so, but Espinoza said in a written ruling that there was no "legal justification" to support that argument. [my emphasis]
Judge the Movie, Not the Man by Samantha Geimer Los Angeles Times 02/2303. In this op-ed, the victim describes clearly what occurred as non-consensual sex, i.e., rape. She also says, "He should have received a sentence of time served 25 years ago, just as we all agreed."
Roman Polanski arrest: Hollywood unties in his defenceThe Guardian Online 09/28/09. This article refers to the victim as "the girl whom Polanski raped at the age of 13", but includes what appears to be an editorial note appended at the end saying, "Some commentators have simply used the term 'rape' in relation to Roman Polanski's 1977 conviction. The offence he pleaded guilty to is often described as 'statutory rape' but more precisely as 'unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor'." This article also discusses the AP leak connected the Swiss action to concerns over banking controversies.
Finally, in a caricature of European cosmopolitanism, France's culture minister fumed that the harrying of such a cultural icon revealed the face of "a scary America."
Some of these arguments are more persuasive than others. For example, Polanski may have a due-process claim based on improper behavior by the judge in his case. By contrast, he shouldn't be left alone because of tragedies in his life or his status as a legendary director. Nor is it relevant that his victim seeks no further punishment for him. Prosecutions are brought in the name of the state, not the victim.
Plausible or preposterous, these arguments are eclipsed by a simple fact: Polanski fled the country.
The one part of that quote with which I would disagree is the sneer at the French culture minister, an implicitly at the French Foreign Minister who made an even stronger statement about his concerns over the extradition, as "a caricature of European cosmopolitanism." And while it's true that the state prosecutes on its own behalf and not in the name of the victim - an important legal reality that some of the rhetoric around "victim's rights" over the years has tended to obscure - it's unlikely in practice that in the event the original charges were thrown out that the DA would attempt to reprosecute the case with a victim unwilling to proceed on a now decades-old charge.
So, we have a case in which the accused accepted a plea bargain and served the agreed sentence, where there is substantial reason to believe there was prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, in which the Los Angeles prosecutor had agree in 1997 to another deal in which the accused would have appeared in court and then gone free, and in which the victim actually agrees that the original charges should be dropped.
The "ick factor" notwithstanding, this doesn't seem like a very good case to make another totem in the "culture war". And while it may be a reminder that the criminal justice system in the US generally thirty years ago tended to treat perpetrators in such cases too leniently, it seems unlikely that this 32-year-old case is likely to produce a very satisfactory outcome for anyone if it's retried. And the prospects seem good that the the original charges will be dropped, for better or for worse.
A number of prominent Hollywood movie-industry figures have publicly come to Polanski's defense over the extradition. So far as I've seen from the news reports, they haven't made a terribly strong case. At the least, they would have presented a more sympathetic case if they had focused more narrowly on due process and official misconduct in the original trial.
At least some of those who are treating it as a straight-forward outrage that anyone would express reservations about official conduct of the case also seem to be more concerned about immunizing themselves from conservative culture-war attacks than sorting out the issues raised by the case. But so long as they are doing it, it's worth flagging that a number of liberals have take a hardline anti-Polanski position in the case:
Katha Pollitt, Roman Polanski Has a Lot of FriendsThe Nation Online 10/01/09: "The widespread support for Polanski shows the liberal cultural elite at its preening, fatuous worst. ... No wonder Middle America hates them." Seeing as how even TV news has morphed into infotainment, I'm not convinced that "Middle America" hates Hollywood stars and directors.
Glenn Greenwald gets into the act with Post editors should read their own columnistsSalon 10/01/09. He seems to be genuinely disgusted at Polanski's defenders. But his main point is that the Washington Post's editorial position attacking Polanski's defenders is in pathetic contrast to its staunch opposition to prosecution of Bush officials for official crimes that include offenses regarded by the law as even more serious than the crime to which Polanski pleaded guilty.
Glenn criticizes three particularly fatuous defenses of Polanski:
The Outrageous Arrest of Roman Polanski by Anne Applebaum Washington Post Online 09/27/09. Applebaum is married to the Polish Foreign Minister, who in his official capacity has expressed concern about Polanski's extradition, a fact she didn't bother to disclose in this piece.
The Smoking Gun site has the transcript of the victim's grand jury testimony from 1977 (if you're thinking about reading it at work, remember that it involves descriptions that screening software could flag as pornographic).
The McCain campaign has made Bill Ayers into the "Willie Horton" of the 2008 Presidential campaign.
Here is part of the text of a robocall being used by the McCain campaign. Chris Wallace confronted McCain with it on FOX News and McCain not only affirmed it was his campaign's material but defended its use with McCarthyist guilt-by-association insinuations against Obama.
I looked up a 1975 hearing of the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee dated 01/31/1975, titled "State Department Bombing by Weatherman Underground". It concerned a bombing at the State Department for which the Weather Underground (WU) organization took responsibility. The Internal Security Subcommittee investigator that Sen. Strom Thurmond had there to testify, Robert James Short, was already convinced that the WU were responsible. They had delivered a 12-page communiqué about the action and they already had an established modus operandi by this point. So their responsibility was not in question.
When I first saw this hearing transcript, I thought I should probably wait until after Nov. 4 to post anything about it so that the focus would be more clearly on the actual historical events rather than election-related. But it only took a few seconds' reflection to recall that the loons are going to believe what they want to believe, especially since McCain has made this a central argument in his campaign.
So I decided I would proceed with a reality-based post (or maybe more than one) about the WU. I've posted historical material about the group before, including Terrorism, the old-fashioned kind 06/04/07 and Was the antiwar movement against the Vietnam War counterproductive? 08/04/07, both of which preceded John McCain adopting Bill Ayers as his campaign mascot. But the latter post in particular dealt with how "the Sixties" figures in the Republican/Christianist "culture war" narrative.
Below is the full text of a contemporary news report of the State Dept. bombing, "Weather Underground Strikes - Bomb Set Off At State Department" by Lance Gay and Brad Holt Washington Star-News 01/29/1975, as it appears in the official subcommittee report.
Several items stand out in looking at this news report now:
No one has ever seen Barack Obama engaging in, encouraging or in any way supporting a violent political action of this type. Just reading the article makes that clear to anyone whose brain hasn't been pickled in OxyContin.
The WU were technically good at the terrorist tactic they used. As Gay and Holt report of the State Department bombing, "The building is one of the most closely guarded government buildings in the Nation's Capital."
No one was injured in the bombing. And it was clear that the WU did not intend to injure anyone. They phoned in a bomb warning before the blast was set to explode.
The WU had engaged in a series of bombings of the same type, all aimed at facilities they took to be symbols of bad acts of American imperialism.
The State Department bombing was specifically described as a protest against continuing aid to the governments of South Vietnam and Cambodia, which the WU claimed were violations of the Paris Peace Accords.
The WU's ideology was secular and political, not religious.
The active members of the WU were a small number, at most a few dozen. Gay and Holt report at the time that FBI "estimates that it consists of 20 to 30 persons".
After the fall of Saigon and Phnom Phen later in 1975, the WU rapidly dissolved into internal factional fights. Despite their sweeping revolutionary rhetoric, the Vietnam War was always their primary focus. As former WU member Brian Flanagan said in a 2003 documentary on the group, "I think that the Vietnam War made us all a little crazy." In that same documentary, the now-newly-infamous Bill Ayers says, "I think the war was what unified us. And when the war ended, it was hard to go on."
Weather Underground terrorist attack on State Dept. men's room, Jan. 1975
As I've said before, even though the Obama campaign understandably wants to avoid saying anything that could be "spun" as defending the WU and their actions, that doesn't get the media off the hook for failing to do elementary fact-checking. And I do think that it's wrong to falsely accuse people of killings, as the McCain robocall depicted above does. As Andrew O'Hehir writes in When terrorism was coolSalon 06/07/03, the only deaths caused by the WU were two of their own members, killed accidentally while assembling a bomb:
As misguided and counterproductive as the Weather Underground's activities may have been, after the townhouse bombing [1970] the group never again planned attacks against human beings. Their post-1970 bombings were symbolic in nature and happened at night when the buildings were empty. For all the vitriol heaped on the Weather Underground by other leftists - and especially by ex-leftist neocons like David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh - it never killed or injured anyone except its own members. (In this regard, it's striking that right-wingers routinely employ the excesses of Weatherman to paint the entire left as anti-American terrorist sympathizers, while the left is either too civil or too cowardly to use the hateful acts of Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and James Kopp to attack conservatives in general.) [my emphasis]
In 1975, Lance Gay and Brad Holt reported very straightforwardly that the WU at that point had claimed responsibility for seven bombings. "None of the previous explosions - one of which was in a washroom at the Capitol, and another in a restroom at the Pentagon - resulted in any injuries." Why can't the press today handle such basic fact-checking and background reporting?
Below is the text of the Gay/Holt article as it appears in the Subcommittee report, except that I've emphasized some passages in bold:
[From the Washington Star-News, Jan. 29, 1975]
WEATHER UNDERGROUND STRIKES—BOMB SET OFF AT STATE DEPARTMENT (By Lance Gay and Brad Holt)
An explosion ripped through a third floor men's restroom at the State Department early today moments after callers here and in San Francisco claiming to represent the anti-war Weather Underground group said they had set bombs in government buildings to protest continued U.S. involvement in Indochina.
No one in the heavily guarded building was injured in the blast, which came at 12:56 a.m. today in a restroom next to the Sahelian Drought Emergency desk - the State Department office coordinating American relief aid to drought-stricken areas of the Sahara Desert.
The explosion tore through two adjoining bathrooms and ripped out parts of the ceiling, breaking water pipes and causing both heavy structural and water damage to the third floor and the two floors below which include the State Department's security offices.
About 19 minutes before the explosion, the Washington office of the Associated Press said it received a call telling the news agency that a "communique" had been left in a telephone booth near the AP office "Tonight we attack the AID (Agency for International Development) in the State Dept. Headquarters in Washington D.C. and the Defense Department in Oakland, California," the 12-page typed letter said. The AID offices are located on the third floor of the State Department complex at 23rd and C Streets NW.
The Washington Post said it also received a call about 12:35 a.m. from a female caller who claimed to be from the Weather Underground and who told the newspaper that a bomb had been placed in the west wing of the State Department. The newspaper contacted D.C. police, who then notified the State Department.
A guard assigned to the building said a District policeman came to the building about 12:50 a.m. "He told me there was a bomb and I picked up the phone to call my office and the bomb went off just then," said the officer, who asked not to be identified. The officer noted the exact time of the blast 12:56 a.m.
There were only a few employees of the department in the tightly secured building at the time and those in the operations division on the 7th floor of the structure said they did not know of the blast until they were told by guards. The building was not evacuated.
"We only heard reports of it, we didn't hear a thing up here," said an employee in the operations division shortly after D.C. police and firemen rushed to the building following the explosion.
"The floor of the third floor looks like a river," said one guard. "Some of the ceiling is down but none of the walls was blown down. The damage is pretty extensive in three rooms." Among the rooms damaged were the offices of AID's African Affairs Division.
District police cordoned off the building and brought in dogs to search for more explosives, but found none. Police also searched buildings at 1901 Pennsylvania Avenue NW and 1875 Connecticut Ave., NW, based on a tip they received, but found no explosives.
Early today, the FBI brought in sifting equipment and were combing through the wreckage to try to determine what kind of explosive device had been used. District bomb squad officers said today that they believe the explosion was caused by a dynamite bomb of perhaps as many as 10 sticks.
In San Francisco, another bomb threat telephoned to the AP prompted officials to cordon off the Armed Forces Induction Center in Oakland, but a search of the sprawling facility failed to turn up any explosive device.
The 12-page letter the AP picked up in a telephone booth near its downtown offices here linked the bombing at the State Department to President Ford's request yesterday for a total of $522 million in arms aid for Cambodia and South Vietnam. Insurgents in both countries have recently achieved a number of military victories and administration officials have warned Congress that South Vietnam will go under unless it is given additional aid.
The Weathermen's statement said the Ford request is a "deliberate and outright sabotage of the Paris Peace agreement" that was signed two years ago. "The U.S. government continues to wage war against Vietnam and Cambodia," the communique continued. "Unable to resolve the deepening economic crisis at home, the imperialists mobilize for further war."
State Department officials said they don't know how anyone could get into the building to plant such a device. The building is one of the most closely guarded government buildings in the Nation's Capital and visitors must have a building pass at all times to get by a guard located in the front lobby. The building was being guarded at three open entrances at the time of the blast.
The early morning bombing marked the seventh time in four years that someone claiming to be from the Weather Underground has claimed responsibility for a bomb blast. None of the previous explosions - one of which was in a washroom at the Capitol, and another in a restroom at the Pentagon - resulted in any injuries.
On March 1, 1971, a time bomb of between 15 and 20 pounds of dynamite, was detonated in a ground floor lavatory at the Capitol, causing minor damage. The Weather Underground claimed responsibility for that explosion and said the act was in retaliation for U.S. foreign policies.
The bomb in the Pentagon was set off May 19, 1972 in a fourth-floor women's restroom of the sprawling complex and again the Weather Underground claimed credit, saying the act was in response to continued U.S. bombing and mining of North Vietnam.
The other bombings the group has claimed credit for were:
The June 14, 1974 explosion at Gulf Oil's international headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pa., which damaged two floors of the 38-story building.
The Sept. 28, 1973 explosion that demolished four rooms at the International Telephone and Telegraph Corp.'s Latin American division offices in New York City.
The May 31, 1974 explosion in the California attorney general's office in Los Angeles that ripped off doors and tore holes in the office ceiling.
The August 1971 explosion and fire that gutted two California prison system offices.
The Weather Underground originally called itself the Weathermen and had its origins in a left-wing splinter group of the radical, but generally non-violent Students for a Democratic Society in the late 1960's. The Weathermen took their name from a 1965 Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues." which includes the verse "You don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows."
The Weathermen officially split off from the SDS in 1969 after a sometimes bitter dispute within SDS over tactics. The group then went underground and the FBI - which has been unable to penetrate the group - estimates that it consists of 20 to 30 persons. One of the group's leaders is Bernardine Dohrn, a fugitive since 1970 who remains on the FBI's "10 Most Wanted" lists.
Meanwhile, in an unrelated incident, more than 1,100 employees of the New Executive Office building near the White House, yesterday were evacuated from the building following a bomb threat. The 10-story building was evacuated for an hour yesterday afternoon while officials searched it and failed to discover anything unusual.
Resentment explains some of this. So does a widespread lack of respect for government itself, and ignorance about what it is and what it requires. Most insidious, perhaps, is the fact that more and more Americans seem to see politics as just another reality TV show. You vote for [Sarah] Palin the same way you vote for a designer on "Project Runway." As Katharine Mieszkowski reported for Salon, Palin's rapturous supporters embrace her because "she represents me." It's the politics of sheer narcissism. [my emphasis]
I don't know if this is based on any actual polling data. But it "rings true" as they say, at least in the sense that I can find it credible that some people look at politics this way.
Kamiya's mention of "reality" TV reminded me of my experience on a jury in a civil case in 2007. I wasn't thrilled about the outcome. It was a 10-2 vote in favor of the plaintiff; a unanimous verdict wasn't required. But I understood why it came out like that. Both the plaintiff and the defendant talked too much on the stand for their own good. And at one point, the defendant got flustered and admitted that he had lied on a key document. And it was a document the defense was using for a key point. So it's understandable that it went that way.
But after the trial was done, as we were leaving, a juror who had been convinced right away that the plaintiff was right and seemed to be in a hurry to get things over with walked up to the plaintiff's attorney as we were leaving and shook his hand and said, "Good job!"
It's normal in a case like that for the attorneys to request the jurors to talk about the decision with them, which I also did. But it just struck me as inappropriate for a juror to go congratulate one of the attorneys as though it were simply a competitive event rather than a legal decision.
And I though to myself when he did that, that this was probably a "reality TV" effect. This guy didn't really care what was the right thing to do. He was just grading the contestants over which was more entertaining.
I can't help but believe that one of the effects of the dysfunction we now see from our celebrity press corps is that many voters are processing political campaigns as "reality TV". Politics has always been part entertainment. But in recent years, we've gone into a qualitative new level of celebrity politics.
When we're thinking about the state of the "horse race", it's important to remember that the Obama campaign is focusing heavily on the Electoral College total.
John Wildermuth of the San Francisco Chronicle points out in McCain, Obama in dead heat, poll says 09/06/08 that the national polls can give a misleading picture:
But even with the national polls giving McCain a boost, it's tough to find many political professionals, even on the Republican side, who don't see Obama as the leader heading into the final months of the election.
Because the Electoral College - not the popular vote - determines who is president, the presidential contest isn't one national election but rather 50 statewide contests. And polls in those states give Obama and the Democrats a commanding lead in the electoral vote.
"It's now a state-by-state effort and not a national campaign," said Garry South, a veteran Democratic consultant. "The popular vote may be fairly close, but I don't believe it will be close at all in the Electoral College."
RealClearPolitics.com, for example, has state polls giving Obama 238 electoral votes and McCain 174, with 10 states with 126 electoral votes listed as tossups. Pollster.com, which also aggregates state polls, gives Obama 260 electoral votes, just 10 short of the 270 he needs to become president.
"It's difficult to say the race is really tied," said [Dan] Schnur [a former McCain spokesman]. "If McCain and his advisers thought he was in the driver's seat, they wouldn't have made the type of gamble selecting Sarah Palin (as the vice presidential nominee) represented." [my emphasis]
Joe Garofoli looks at the culture-war approach current being taken by the McCain-Palin campaign in GOP tests out renewing U.S. 'culture wars'San Francisco Chronicle 09/07/08.. His report gives us reason to think this is a desperation strategy, reflecting the Republicans' serious challenges in the Electoral College. But we'd have to qualify that somewhat. The Republicans try to exploit "culture war" issues in every Presidential election. But based on the Republican Convention, they are clearly putting unusual stress on it this time around. But Garofoli writes:
... Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California, said the culture-war rhetoric may disappear in a couple of weeks if the McCain campaign's internal polling shows that it isn't connecting with swing voters.
"They were test-marketing a lot of concepts in (Palin's) speech," Baldassare said. "They were trying out an anti-Washington message, an anti-media message and an anti-Democratic message. We'll know more in a couple of weeks. And we'll also be able to tell a lot by how the Democrats respond."
That last is key. The Democrats can't afford to ignore those attacks. The record on the Dems' response is mixed right now, so far as I can see.
Garofoli puts the "uppity" remark from a Republican Congressman last week into the context of the current McCain-Palin campaign:
The GOP is crafting its narrative in the language of a sort of reverse snobbery. On Thursday, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., called the Obamas - who were both educated at Ivy League schools - "members of an elitist class that thinks they're uppity." Though Westmoreland, a white Republican who represents the Atlanta suburbs, said he didn't mean it in a racial sense, the term has its roots in the pre-Civil War South to describe blacks who spoke up for themselves. [my emphasis]
Garofoli is writing there like a real journalist! He didn't rely on a "this side says, the other side says" construction to tell the readers what "uppity" means in political language.
He does the same with the Limbaugh/Republican use of "community organizer" as an insult; "ghetto agitator" would be the definition I use for what they mean. Garofoli:
In this war, "community organizer" is synonymous with working for a liberal nonprofit organization. Apparently, Republicans have forgotten about how President George H.W. Bush's call for a "thousand points of light" turned into the Hands On Network/Points of Light Foundation, which organizes volunteers to do charitable work.
He defines the Republicans' current approach as follows: "Using the GOP paintbrush, the race pits the 'ex-POW war hero' and the 'hockey mom' versus the Ivy League elitist and the career senator."
And he describes how the hardcore conservatives among the Republican delegates to last week's Convention tend to view the "culture war" issues:
They loathe the media and love [Palin's] hard line on abortion, which she opposes even if the woman is the victim of rape or incest. And social conservatives approve of her conservative evangelical Christian church in Wasilla supporting a conference in nearby Anchorage that proposes to convert gays to heterosexuals through the power of prayer.
There's one more Chronicle article worth citing here, GOP resurging as party of mavericks by Carla Marinucci 09/07/08. Marinucci gives a picture of the challenge the McCain-Palin ticket faces in trying to distance themselves from the disastrous brand image of their own Republican Party:
Can McCain-Palin sell themselves as the agents of change - and distance themselves from their party's two-term hold on the White House under George W. Bush - in the urban and suburban enclaves where moderate and independent voters are worried about gas prices and the war in Iraq, the home mortgage crisis and health care?
"You never saw the word 'Republican' in the convention hall," said Democratic strategist Phil Trounstine, who noted the waving signs proclaiming "service" and "peace" but nothing regarding Bush or the GOP. "McCain is saying elect me because of who I am. Which might work, if they weren't so closely tied to the party that has been in power for the past eight years.
"They're trying to present themselves as the maverick party, not the Republican Party ... and John McCain is trying to position himself as if he were not the standard bearer for the GOP," he said. "He's running as an independent - and it's Palin's job to gin up the base. It's a two-pronged attack." ...
But with 80 percent of Americans believing that the country is on the wrong track, and Bush's approval ratings at an all-time low, ... the sales job won't be easy. The party's convention was unabashed in its efforts to erase the memory of its standard-bearer, Bush, whose name was mentioned just twice the entire week by elected officials. [my emphasis]
The scope of urban violence in the United States in the form of riots during the 1960s is pretty amazing. Here's a partial chronology (sources at the end of this post):
1964: July, Harlem riot; followed by similar disorderly protests that same summer in Brooklyn, Rochester NY, Paterson NJ, Jersey City, Elizabeth, Philadelphia and San Francisco.
1966: Rioting in 20 cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, Cleveland, Chicago, Omaha
1967: Newark and Detroit riots; riots of less intensity in over 20 cities including Toledo OH, Grand Rapids MI, Plainfield NJ, Milwaukee WI; riots spread to Southern cities of Jackson, Nashville and Houston
Feb, 1968: Orangeburg Massacre in South Carolina, in which police and National Guard open fire on black students, killing three and wounding 27.
April, 1968: James Earl Ray assassinates Martin Luther King, Jr.; hell breaks loose, with riots in over 100 cities constituting the largest urban uprising in American history
Part of what gets lost in a superficial look at these events is that they are many-dimensional. I'm not making some stock "this side says, the other side says" filler comment here. Three distinct kinds of views formed about the riots: a mainstream liberal view, more-or-less represented by the Kerner Commission's recommendations that (in stereotypical "liberal" fashion) emphasized the diverse aspects of the phenomena; law-and-order conservatives viewed it as irresponsibile crime and violence and overwhelmingly emphasized a law-enforcement, punitive response, or "repression" to phrase it differently; and, both integrationist civil rights groups and Black Power/black-nationalist groups focused heavily on the community grievances involved. More on this below. But it's important to keep in mind that in 1968, "liberal" and "conservative" weren't so closely aligned with the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively, as they are today.
Joseph Boskin quotes the Kerner Commission Report of 1968 as listing the following as the leading grievances among African-Americans. It was in African-American communities that most of these disorders occurred. (If anyone knows somewhere online where the entire text of the Kerner Commission Report is available, please let me know.) They were:
First Level of Intensity: 1. Police practices 2. Unemployment and underemployment 3. Inadequate housing
Second Level of Intensity: 1. Inadequate education 2. Poor recreational facilities and programs 3. Ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms
Third Level of Intensity: 1. Disrespectful white attitudes 2. Discriminatory administration of justice 3. Inadequacy of federal programs 4. Inadequacy of municipal services 5. Discriminatory consumer and credit practices 6. Inadequate welfare programs
It's notable that "police practices" heads the list of grievances. In many cases, such as the Newark riot of 1967, it was some instance of police brutality that set off the riot. In almost all cases, that was a factor. (The disorders after the King assassination were a special case triggered by his murder, though long-standing grievances clearly played a role there, too.)
We can back into the issue of police brutality from today's perspective. For more affluent whites, their most common antagonistic encounter with the police would be getting pulled over for a traffic violation. For non-whites, even that kind of encounter triggers more apprehension, because minorities more often have the experience of encountering police misconduct of some kind.
But this doesn't imply some general hostility to police. In Oakland this year, for instance, Mayor Ron Dellums recently announced a program to increase the police force in response to a rise in deadly violence, most of it drug- and gang-related. Low-income communities are where such violence often occurs, and the residents demand beter police protection. They want good police service where it's needed, not to be rid of the police. And people who live in or near neighborhoods where drive-by shootings and fights between gangs with firearms are a daily risk have a much more realistic, practical and urgent sense of what the need for law and order is. "Law-and-order" becomes more of a symbolic slogan for people less confronted with the daily reality of violent crime.
But even in Oakland, the police don't always handle things appropriately, e.g., Police Violence Shocks Activists, Others at Port of Oakland Protest by Dana Hull San Jose Mercury News 04/07/03 (link is to the copy at CommonDreams.org). Philadelphia police were just a few weeks ago caught on camera beating the crap out of a restrained suspect (Video shows police beating restrained suspects CNN.com 05/07/08). For anybody with half-sense, police who feel free to ignore the law and beat somebody up is always a real problem.
In Newark in 1967, the riot of several days there was touched off when an African-American cab driver named John Smith was arrested for allegedly tailgating and driving the wrong way on a one-way street. Here was how Smith described it in court at his bail hearing:
There was no resistance on my part. That was a cover story by the police. They caved in my ribs, busted a hernia, and put a hole in my head. ... After I got into the precinct six or seven other officers along with the two who arrested me kicked and stomped me in the ribs and back. They then took me to a cell and put my head over the toilet bowl. While my head was over the toilet bowl, I was struck on the back of the head with a revolver. I was also being cursed while they were beating me. An arresting officer in the cell block said, "This baby is mine."
Unlike many other cases of this kind, local civil rights leaders saw him very soon after he was arrested and could confirm that he had been seriously beaten.
Tom Hayden wrote a detailed account of the 1967 Newark riot, published first as a special supplement to the New York Review of Books, The Occupation of Newark 08/24/1967; as of this writing, the link does not appear to be behind subscription. At his Web site, the article is linked with an introduction that says:
The article was the first exposure of how 26 killings happened during that week. Hayden was responsible for recommending a troop pullout to Governor Richard Hughes after an all night meeting. The Governor agreed to withdraw the troops, and Hayden was dragged before a grand jury demanding his notes. He refused, fearing that the Newark police would intimidate community eyewitnesses to the murders of unarmed people. The grand jury did not indict Hayden, but the Pentagon's special forces used his book in riot control training centers.
As Hayden describes the event:
What was unusual about John Smith's case was the fact that the police were forced to let respected civil-rights leaders see his condition less than two hours after the beating. The police were trapped and nervous because they had been caught by civil-rights leaders whose account could not be discredited. A neighborhood resident had called several of these leaders - including activists from CORE, the United Freedom Party, and the Newark Community Union Project - minutes after Smith was brought in.
After they had a heated argument about Smith with officers in the precinct, an inspector arrived from central police headquarters and agreed to let the group see the prisoner in his cell. "Don't listen to what he says. He's obviously upset and nervous as you might expect," the inspector told the group. The group was incensed after seeing Smith's condition. They demanded that he be sent immediately to the hospital. The police complied, while others searched for witnesses, lawyers, and members of Smith's family.
It was at this point that witnesses who were in the precinct house say the police began putting on riot helmets. None of the activists felt there was going to be an explosion, and none remembers a crowd of more than a hundred in the street at this point. (my emphasis)
A crowd gathered outside the police station that same evening, and local black leaders urged them to remain peaceful. But some people were in a different mood:
A local man took the police bullhorn [that one of the community leaders was using] and simply said, "Come down the street, we got some shit." In the darkness across from the precinct young men from the neighborhood were picking up bricks and bottles, and looking for some gasoline.
Missiles started to fly at the precinct, where 110 windows would eventually be broken. A friend pulled Curvin away from the front of the station, and the rest of the assembled crowd moved back in anticipation of the police. The police came out with helmets and clubs but were driven back inside by a torrent of bricks and bottles. People were starting to move across the street as the front of the precinct became a battle zone.
Just after midnight, two Molotov cocktails exploded high on the western wall of the precinct. A stream of fire curled fifty feet down the wall, flared for ten seconds, and died. The people, now numbering at least 500 on the street, let out a gasp of excitement. Fear, or at least caution, was apparent also: many people retreated into the darkness or behind cars in the Hayes parking lot.
I suppose it's worth saying at this point what should be obvious but often isn't, that explaining something is not the same as justifying it, understanding is not the same as approving. These are distinctions the "culture warriors" still find it convenient to forget.
Part of the problem in policing was that urban police departments at the time were often all-white, or nearly so. And some of them had distinctly hostile attitudes toward blacks. Hayden explains that in Newark at the time:
Much of the community viewed the police as the tool of more direct intimidation, harassment, and violence. Dominated by the Italians who run Newark politics, tainted by alleged underworld connections, and with a token of only 250 blacks among 1400 members, the Police Department was seen as the spearhead of organized hostility to Negro action, an armed unit protecting the privileges of the shrinking white community of the city. A year of federally sponsored workshop meetings of police and neighborhood people apparently was not enough to modify "police-community relations." On the wall of Headquarters there are two signs which hint at the police world view: "BOMB HANOI" and "GO TO COLLEGE AND LEARN TO RIOT."
Police departments were often not trained on methods of dealing with riot situations or even unruly crowds. So even when acting in good faith they sometimes needlessly inflamed situations that could have been defused. And when the National Guard was called in to help in riot situations, which happened in Newark in 1967, they were often not trained in regular policing, much less riot control.
Hayden again:
"An obvious open rebellion," asserted [Democratic] Governor [Richard] Hughes after his tour of Newark at 5 A.M. Friday. From that announcement until Monday afternoon, the black community was under military occupation. More than 3000 National Guardsmen were called up Friday morning from the surrounding white suburbs and southern Jersey towns. Five hundred white state troopers arrived at the same time. By mid-afternoon Friday they were moving in small convoys throughout the city, both clockwise and counter-clockwise, circling around seven parts of the ghetto. Guardsmen were moving in jeeps or small open trucks, usually led or followed by carloads of troopers or Newark police. Bayonets were attached to the Guard's 30-caliber M-1 rifles or 30-caliber carbines, which they carried in addition to 45-caliber pistols. Personnel carriers weighing as much as eleven tons, and trucks mounted with machine guns, appeared here and there among the jeeps and police cars. The presence of these vehicles was designed, according to Governor Hughes, to build the confidence of the Negro community.
Confidence in what? Hughes defined the issues over and over in television, radio, and press interviews, as well as in meetings with community leaders. "The line between the jungle and the law might as well be drawn here as any place in America," he announced shortly after arriving in Newark. On Saturday he talked again of the line between society and the jungle, adding that the Negroes "had better choose sides" becauses the "side of law and order has joined this to the finish." (my emphasis)
Conservatives may claim now that it was "condescending" of liberals in the 1960s to suggest that "law and order" was sometimes used as a racial code word. Condescending to whom? To blacks in Newark who found their neighborhood under bascially all-white military occupation justified with that kind of rhetoric?
Boskin makes a useful distinction between the riots immediately following King's assassination and other such occurrences earlier in the decade. Those were more in the nature of an outburst of anger. While the other riots were more in the nature of spontaneous political action. Boskin writes:
Despite the disparity of distance, there was a consensus of attitudes and a similarity of actions among those urban blacks who revolted and those who supported the violent protest. Signficantly, the riots were largely unplanned, unorganized and unscheduled. ...
Taken together, the riots were the actions of a people, poor and disposessed and crushed in huge numbers into large slum ghettos, who reose up in wrath against a society committed to democratic ideals. Their outburst was an expression of class antagonism, resentment against racial prejudice, anger at the unreachable affluence around them, and frustration at their sociopolitical powerlessness. "What are these people riotin' about in other cities?" exclaimed Efelka Brown, of the "Sons of Watts," an organization set up to train young males in trade skills. "They want recognition and the only way they goin' get it is to riot. We don't want to overthrow the country - we just want what we ain't got." ...
To strike out against the visible symbols of white society became a sign of brotherhood. ... Many residents of ghetto areas who did not participate in the actions should their approval to those on the streets.
That a general approval, a collective behavior, pervaded the ghettos can be borne out by analysis of the actions of blacks. The two groups singled out for attack were the police and Caucasian-owned businesses.
Recognizing this aspect of those events does not mean that they were a good way to proceed. And even though our "culture warriors" may associate riots with the Black Panthers, neither they nor any other significant group actually organized and promoted riots. Boskin also observes:
The nature of the rioting which marked the mid-1960's appeared to undergo serious change by the end of the decade. Two indications of this change were, firstly, the Detroit riot of 1967 in which a sizable proportion of Caucasians joined with the Negroes in burning and looting, thus indicating a meshing of an economic underclass; and, secondly, the development and intensity of the Black Power movement. The activists have been concerned with developing cultural, economic, and political programs within the community. These activist organizations have, on more than one occasion, prevented violent outbreaks by ghetto residents who were angered by representatives of the power structure, particularly the police. (my emphasis)
This doesn't mean that Black Power groups all counseled non-violence. On the contrary, the Black Panthers and others exclicitly rejected the notion of restricting their activism to nonviolence and encouraged African-Americans to arm and train themselves for violent self-defense.
And apart from that famous "white backlash", the negative impact of riots and the police reaction on the affected communities was great, no matter what constructive developments may have followed. In the riots following King's assassination, 39 people were killed, 35 of them African-American. Boskin notes of the riots prior to that time:
The toll of the rioting over the four-year period was devastating. Between 1964 and 1967, approximately 130 civilians, mainly Negroes, and 12 civil personnel, mainly Caucasian, were killed. Approximately 4,700 Negroes and civil personnel were injured. Over 20,000 persons were arrested during the melees; property damages mounted into the hundreds of millions of dollars; many cities resembled the hollowed remnants of war-torn cities.
In "culture war" mythology, these riots were the results of liberal "permissiveness". Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote about how that played in the 1968 Presidential election:
As for racial justice, the Wallace movement may have had the useful effect of making many voters think about the consequences of their prejudices. Wallace tempted them for a while; but then in the end they drew back, and Wallace's appeal contracted rather swiftly to the lower Confederacy. Probably Mr. [Samuel] Lubell is also right in suggesting that "the strength of Wallace's backing ... shocked many liberals and Negroes into realizing that excesses on the Negro side have to be curbed." In any case, I would agree with his conclusion that "the preponderant part of the electorate, in most of the South as well as in the North, is prepared to support a 'middle course' policy that would curb racial violence while still continuing Negro progress." (my emphasis)
A middle course between what? Between those politicians who were in favor of riots and those opposed to them? And the politicians in favor would be, uh, not a single one I can think of. Schlesinger wrote that he "would agree" with such a middle approach. But he doesn't cite any politicians who advocated urban riots as a "permissable" alternative. What he doesn't say is that some voters were at least willing to regard alleged Democratic "permissiveness" as responsible for the riots.
But that impression, promoted by Richard Nixon and George Wallace, was in large part a accident of Presidential politics. There was a Democratic administration in power during 1964-68 and the urban riots were one big reason many voters were discontented with the way things were. But Lyndon Johnson scarcely took a "permissive" attitude toward riots. Many of the cities where riots occurred had Democratic mayors. The New Jersey Governor who used such scare-talk in 1967 in calling out the National Guard was a Democrat. Bobby Kennedy, who had very highly credibility among black voters, was emphatic about the need for effective law-enforcement action against rioters. The "culture war" view of liberal "permissiveness" on urban riots is little more than vapid ideology.
Sources used in this post:
Joseph Boskin, "The Revolt of the Urban Ghettos, 1964-1967", The Annals 382 March 1969
